[spam] Re: Morality

CSGnet Archive CSG2006
1

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.19.0800 MDT)]

Martin Taylor 2006.08.18.13.37 --

I can think of a fourth, which makes more sense to me than do 1 to 3.

4. Morality consists of patterns of learned ways of controlling perceptions relating to the behaviour of other people. Those patterns that have been evolutionarily stable in relatively closed societies (the societies have not self-destructed yet) constitute the morality (and customs and manners) of that society. The distinction between morality and customs and manners relates to the levels of the perceptions controlled, though by virtue of the likelihood that severe impacts on other people are more likely than gentle one to disrupt the society, the major elements of morality often concern matters of life and death as well as of fairness in property transactions.

According to 4., all social animals will have forms of morality, meaning ways to determine correct behaviour, such as formation of a pecking order, sexual rights, acceptable forms of punishment for deviance, etc.

I like this one better than the first three offered, too. It's much like the view I described, though more organized.

I think that as we develop social models based on PCT principles in individual behavior, it will become clear that some modes of social interaction work while others are not viable. Ideas about fairness, for example, may grow out the experience that if one person gets certain benefits from others, all people will probably demand them once they see them being given. So the path of least resistance (least conflict, that is) is simply to adopt a principle of fairness. Things like that would tend to show up in any society, not because there is some mysterious "moral sphere" but for reasons grounded in our basic organization. On the other hand, there is room for a lot of variation. I have heard that there is no word for fairness in Russian (admitting that this is possibly a scurrilous outgrowth of the Cold War). Ideas of sexual morality vary widely, though there are also some similarities. Concepts of charity and empathy seem pretty variable -- I recall the famous story in the Reader's Digest about Chinese verses Western reactions when a dog gets run over in the street and is seen struggling and crying. The Chinese, it was said, laugh. I don't know if that is true. I have also heard it claimed that Texans aim their pickup trucks at jackrabbits on the highway. I can also report that the official Chinese principle of fairness does not include rewarding authors for use of their work -- and I can report that some individual Chinese do believe in that principle, and have been known to take it upon themselves to see that it is adhered to. I don't think they know that I know, but if they are reading this list, they do now.

I see a distinct possibility that we get a distorted picture of morality because people find it advisable to claim that they support the current popular morals whether they really do or not. It's like belief in God: I think a lot of people will answer questions about their belief in the affirmative because they are a bit worried about what will happen if they deny any such belief. In England, my impression is that many more people than in America scoff at the God idea and organized religion, implying that there is less fear of reprisal and being cast out. Speaking of sexual morality, it's pretty clear that far more people claim they uphold the more common strictures than actually do so. There is a sort of "official" morality which people say they support, and then there is the actual, practical morality that they find possible to live with. It helps if there is some mechanism for dissolving the guilt once a week or so.

We are all sinners, thunders the hypocrite in the pulpit. Of course we are: the morality we actually live by is different from the one we publicly admit to and say, when asked, that we demand of others. And each person thinks that everyone else behaves perfectly.

Best,

Bill P.

···

If 4 is correct, morality could be quite different in different societies, but the moral principles within one society should be likely to lead to less conflict within the society than would those principles with minor changes. But when people from societies with different moral principles interact, conflict, perhaps severe, is to be expected. Moreover, it will be hard for people on either side of that conflict to comprehend why those on the other side can conceive of behaving the way they do.

I think we observe the effects suggested in the last two paragraphs, which follow directly from proposition 4, but which seem hard to accommodate within the frame of propositions 1 to 3 (although if there are many different Gods, ithe observations could be accommodated by proposition 2).

Martin

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2

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.24.0430 MDT)]

Richard Kennaway (2006.08.24.1056 BST) –

[Martin Taylor]: The observed
effects include the incomprehension most of us seem to have about mothers
who with pride and joy send their sons out to commit suicide and mass
murder. It’s a very moral act in one society, and incomprehensibly evil
in another.

What’s to understand? They do it. They speak volumes about
why. All anyone has to do is listen. If someone prefers not to
listen, that’s just another preference, perhaps a preference for not
understanding people whose goals are highly inimical to their
own.

I’m not sure understanding comes that easily. It doesn’t for me. I can
see what people do, but what they say about why they do it often sounds
like gibberish to me. I’m not sure they understand it themselves. People
let themselves be pushed around by words a lot. They listen, they make up
their own meanings for words, and they assume that that’s what everyone
else means. They think that if something has a name, it must be
real.

There’s a story by Eric Temple Bell called “The Gostak and the
Doshes.” The protagonist is a visitor to a country where there is a
fierce argument with some outher group going on about whether the Gostak
distims the Doshes. The visitor goes around trying to get people to tell
him what the argument is about. What’s the Gostak? Why the Gostak is what
distims, and what it distims is the Doshes. Certainly you don’t doubt
that! And Doshes? The Doshes, of course, are eminently suited to being
distimmed, especially by the Gostak. Distimming, as everyone knows, is
what is done to Doshes by the Gostak. And if you say otherwise, you’re
one of those damned Others, and you have no business being here. We’re
all good Gostak-fearing Dosh-supporters around here and we have a healthy
respect for distimming. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll show a
little more respect, too.

Of course the visitor never does find out what these words mean, because
nobody knows (even though they have riots about them). If I remember
right, the visitor gets caught up in the ideas and starts echoing the
slogans.

What is this
“should”? There is only “is” and “is
not”. And it’s mostly “is not”. One could
hardly have a greater imbalance of power than that in a prison, yet
prison governors can’t even keep drugs and mobile phones away from the
inmates.

But don’t the inmates think they should be able to get drugs and phones?
If not, why try to get them?
I’d say “should” is a word we use for reference signals. I
should get up, but it’s nicer to lie in bed. You should be nicer to me.
Tab A should go into slot B. The “is” and “is not”
are perceptions; they’re how the world actually appears to us, as opposed
to how we want it to appear. Tab A should go in Slot B. Tab A IS NOT in
slot B. Voila, error! And the is-not becomes an
is.
When you say “just another preference,” you downplay the
importance of reference signals, as if preferences were nothing but whims
appearing out of nowhere. But HPCT says that preferences are selected for
reasons having to do with higher-order preferences, and they can be
extremely important, such as a preference for not having your throat cut,
or a preference for having a positive balance in your bank account. The
whole structure of HPCT is a structure of adjustable preferences for
perceptual variables being in particular states.
When we speak of what someone else “should” do, we’re stating
our own reference condition for their behavior. Of course we’d also like
to imply that there is some reason they must do it other than our
own preference, so they’ll be more likely to do it. When you imply that
we shouldn’t say “should”, that’s what you’re doing. But of
course people will go right on using the word – that’s the
“is”. They think it means something even if you don’t. They
think it has the same force for other people that it has for them when
they say or think, “I really should …”. So if you can
persuade someone that he should do or not do something, there is a chance
he actually will or won’t do it.

To say “should” also hints at a conflict. When you say “I
should do that,” the implication is that you’re not doing it. If
you’re not doing it, but have a reference condition for doing it, there
is error. If the error doesn’t decrease, and there is no external
interference, what is wrong? Either you don’t have any means for doing
it, or there is another control system at the same level with a reference
condition that effective says “I want NOT to do it.” Conflicts
are very effective in keeping you from doing things you think you should
do, or making you go on doing things you think you should not
do.

I think your objection to “should” is not to the idea of a
reference signal, but to the idea that I can set your reference signals.
When you tell me I should or should not do something, that is all you can
do – tell me. Nothing will happen unless I agree, and voluntarily set my
own reference signal to the value you suggest. If I do agree that I
should do what you suggest, the chances become fairly good that I will do
it if I know how, unless I’m in conflict about it. Once again, it all
comes down to agreement. You might say that agreement is the basic social
variable.

···

====================================================

One of the problems with assimilating PCT is that there was a time before
we knew about PCT. During that time, we all developed world views,
theories, preferences, convictions even, on other grounds. When we learn
about PCT, however, we do not automatically cancel older ways of thinking
that are actually contradictory to PCT. We just develop what someone once
called “logic-tight compartments”. If you had an ideology of
some sort before PCT, you still have it, and argue as if it were still
valid, without even thinking how it relates to PCT. If you did think
about that, chances are you would see that you have to give up either
your ideology or PCT. That has happened to me more times than I can
count.

As far as I am concerned, nothing I believed before PCT had anywhere near
the internal consistency or the empirical demonstrability that PCT has.
This is true even when there remain some points of agreement between what
I thought before and what I think now. I long ago gave up the hope of
preserving what I used to think. For me, PCT is now my most basic
organizing principle for understanding experience. All the other
logic-tight compartments have been breached; I can no longer keep them
separated. Whatever I think or believe now has to be part of one
consistent picture of the world, as far as I can manage that.

I can’t make anyone else adopt that concept, or give up any other
concept. All I can do is let my preference be known, and see what
happens.

Best,

Bill P.

3

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.24.0930 MDT)]

Richard Kennaway (2006.08.24.1408 BST)–

“Should” is an example
of that. I agree (now that I’m not channelling Friedman) that it
actually refers to people’s references, but people using the word often
do not think that that is what they are talking about. They speak
instead as if they think they are talking about something independent of
themselves, as if “X should do Y” is true or false independent
of anyone’s preferences, even their own.

That’s what they would like to persuade us of, isn’t it? I think the
proper answer to that was devised a long time ago – over here, one says
“Sez who?”
Some people respond, “God.” Wow, if God says you should do it,
or not do it, you’d better pay attention. Others make laws, which carry
penalties for violating them. The whole point of using “should”
in the moral or normative sense is to invoke real or imagined authority
that can enforce obedience. It’s a way of saying that this isn’t merely
my own feeble opinion that you can ignore if you wish.
But we have to realize that many people say “should” because
they really believe it. They believe there are moral forces that act
independently of us, and first of all they believe that they themselves
are subject to those forces. If they tell someone else what they should
do, it could be in the spirit of worrying about the other person and
trying to save that person from getting into serious trouble – an act of
friendship, not coercion, or so it seems to them.
How do we deal with “should” when the force behind it is simply
the laws of the natural world? You shouldn’t ride a motorcycle without
wearing a helmet. You shouldn’t drink water out of a mud puddle. You
shouldn’t play in traffic. You shouldn’t jump off a barn roof with an
umbrella, hoping to fly. You shouldn’t turn off the power on your
computer while the hard disk is being written to. “Shoulds” of
that kind aren’t necessarily attempts to control other people. They’re a
way of warning of a bad consequence without going into all the details of
just what is bad about it. If you want to ride a motorbike without a
helmet on, that’s your choice, but if you have an accident your chances
of surviving with a working brain are much higher if you wear a helmet.
Unsaid, of course, is “… and I would be very upset if you really
got hurt because I like you.” There is a certain element of control
in this, but it’s more like trying not to have a horrible experience of a
friend dying.
Every “should” should be followed by an “if”, if the
object is to make clear that you’re not being dictatorial. You should not
drink out of a mud puddle if you don’t want to get dysentery, which I
just discovered I maybe can’t spell, and my dictionary is still in
a box. You shouldn’t turn the power off if you want to save your data.
And so on. The “if” sketches in the bad consequence that you
assume the person would want to avoid.

And having worked through the possibilities up to that point, it now
strikes me that practically all “shoulds”, if properly followed
by an “if”, would reveal why the person is saying
“should” and perhaps make it not only understandable but
forgivable. “You shouldn’t do that if you don’t want God to send you
to Hell.” You may believe that this is a misguided idea, but if the
other person believes it is true, the worst you can say about that person
is that he or she doesn’t want you to suffer in Hell. It’s the same thing
as saying “You shouldn’t jump off the barn roof with an umbrella if
you don’t want to be injured or killed.”

So that brings the whole discussion down to the point of motivation, the
next level up. When someone tells me what I should do, is that in order
to control me, or in order to warn me of a consequence I might wish to
avoid? That makes a great deal of difference to me. If I’m being warned
of a consequence, I might disagree about its likelihood, but I won’t
resent being told. I might say, “I don’t believe I will go to Hell
for doing that, but I think you’re kind and generous to be concerned
about me.” I would do my best to mean it, too.

In case you hadn’t noticed, while I was writing all that worthy prose I
was not packing stuff into boxes. You can judge for yourself whether the
goal of enlightening you was behind the writing, or simply that of
putting off what I must now go and do. I am almost finished, but there
seems to be a logarithmic scale operating here, so no matter how close I
am to the end, it still seems as if I haven’t got anywhere. Now I know
where Zeno’s Paradox really came from.

Best,

Bill P.